Attempt to ID migrants who died on trek

Unidentified bodies in Brooks County to be exhumed.

Brooks County Judge Raul M. Ramirez walks through the county cemetery in Falfurrias. He says many dead immigrants aren’t found. “We find only like 10 (percent) or 20 percent of what is out there. ... That really concerns me.”

Brooks County Judge Raul M. Ramirez walks through the county cemetery in Falfurrias. He says many dead immigrants aren’t found. “We find only like 10 (percent) or 20 percent of what is out there. ... That

Brooks County Judge Raul M. Ramirez walks through the county cemetery in Falfurrias. He says many dead immigrants aren’t found. “We find only like 10 (percent) or 20 percent of what is out there. ... That really concerns me.”

Brooks County Judge Raul M. Ramirez walks through the county cemetery in Falfurrias. He says many dead immigrants aren’t found. “We find only like 10 (percent) or 20 percent of what is out there. ... That

FALFURRIAS — The human smuggling routes that circumvent the Falfurrias checkpoint in Brooks County cut through miles of thick, suffocating brush that tears at the skin. The canopy of oak blots out the sky and feet sink ankle-deep into the sandy soil. During the summer months, the heat climbs into the 100s, sapping vital energy reserves of the immigrants who traverse the disorienting landscape.

It was along these clandestine trails that Aldo Herrera Garcia disappeared in May. His family has given up hope of finding Aldo alive, but recovering his body still is possible, though undoubtedly complicated.

“We may never know what happened,” said Aldo's older brother, Alejandro. “Getting up every day with the same question, 'What really happened?'” You never expect to live with something like that.”

Untold numbers of migrants die on the perilous journey across the U.S.-Mexico border every year. Many of them are buried anonymously in unmarked paupers' graves.

For the past decade, amid a rising number of unidentified dead, Lori Baker, a physical anthropologist at Baylor University in Waco, has taken on the arduous task of identifying and repatriating the remains of undocumented immigrants, scattered throughout morgues and cemeteries in the U.S. Southwest.

Beginning in May, her project, called Reuniting Families, will take on its biggest challenge yet when it exhumes the remains of dozens of unidentified immigrants interred in Falfurrias Cemetery, calling attention to an ongoing human tragedy largely obscured by immigration policies.

“This is a humanitarian crisis, and something needs to be done,” Baker said. “It's almost like there has been a mass disaster in Brooks County over the last two years, and we need to react as if there is a mass disaster.”

Last year, ranchers and law enforcement in Brooks County, a rural patchwork of ranchland with about 7,200 residents, stumbled upon 129 decomposing bodies and skeletal remains of undocumented immigrants. That was by far the most in any Texas county and about double what it was the year before and six times higher than in 2010.

Without a local medical examiner, Brooks authorities transfer bodies to a mortuary 80 miles away for identification. Autopsies are called for on the rare occasion that foul play seems possible, but DNA tests, at a cost of several thousand dollars each, are considered exorbitant.

By year's end, 35 immigrant dead from 2012 still were nameless and returned to Falfurrias for burial, igniting a public outcry from immigrant advocacy groups calling for the use of DNA tests to aid in the identification process.

The county's decision to partner with Reuniting Families defused escalating tensions for the time being, but significant challenges lay ahead for forensic anthropologists from Baylor, Texas State University and the University of Rochester Medical Center.

To create a biological profile of the remains, such as age, sex, ancestry and post-mortem trauma and to obtain DNA to be filed in national identity databases, anthropologists will have to sort through as many as 54 sets of remains.

Although some grave sites in Falfurrias Cemetery have numerical markers, with blunt descriptions of what lies underground, like “Skull Case” or “John Doe,” other graves have lost their markers. Official records often are misleading, and the pauper caskets that encase the immigrant remains, made of a cardboard material that quickly breaks down in the soil, impede the identification process.

“You never know what to expect,” Baker said. “What we find is rarely what we've been told.”

Nameless remains

The lack of a uniform system for counting the dead is a problem the length of the border, and the varying criteria applied by counties make official data unreliable, hindering efforts to identify the deceased once they're in the ground.

Texas has the largest swath of the Southwest border, more than 1,240 miles, and while the state offers guidance on how to handle remains, discretion and practices vary according to jurisdiction.

“When we look at the total number of deaths on the border, it's very difficult to know if they are right because nobody really knows how many people die in Texas,” Rubio-Goldsmith said. “There are hundreds of people reported missing, and there are hundreds of people unidentified, and yet there's no way of putting those two things together right now.”

For fiscal year 2012, the Border Patrol reported 463 migrant deaths in the Southwest border sector, and though the Tucson sector, which at 170 recorded the most deaths, nearly 60 percent of all deaths occurred in Texas, the greatest number of them in Brooks County.

During one particularly brutal stretch between June and September, bodies were turning up with such regularity that rancher Mike Vickers claims he numbed to the sight of a bloated corpse or skeletal remains.

“It doesn't take long for the wildlife to consume them,” Vickers said. “We had an emaciated steer a few months ago, and he had something stuck in his mouth that looked like a ball; it turned out to be a human skull.”

Vickers heads up the Texas Border Volunteers, a group of several hundred landowners and their supporters who monitor smuggling activity on private property and report what they find to law enforcement.

A decade ago, the Border Patrol had a fraction of the agents and tactical infrastructure that it does today. Now, miles of fencing block easy passage, and more than 21,000 agents patrol the Southwest region, funneling immigrants and their smugglers to more hazardous terrain.

But even as apprehensions have steadily declined in recent years, at the same time, immigrant deaths are on the rise.

Since the Border Patrol started gathering statistics on undocumented immigrant deaths in 1998, the number of deaths per 10,000 people apprehended has climbed by more than 500 percent, according to Baker's analysis of Border Patrol data.

Calls about the missing

To navigate the dangerous journey and avoid detection, immigrants pay smugglers thousands of dollars to take them across the border safely. But human smuggling is a coldhearted business, and undocumented immigrants are its cargo. Once a person begins to lag behind, their smuggler is losing time and money, Brooks County Judge Raul M. Ramirez explained.

Ramirez has been witness to the death pose of many immigrant dead, their putrid odor impossible to forget, and he's certain there are more out there, decaying in the brush.

“We find only like 10 (percent) or 20 percent of what is out there,” Ramirez said. “That means there is a lot that we don't find, and that really concerns me.”

And yet, ranchers are unlikely to freely grant unfettered access to search their vast properties for remains, as Rafael Larraenza Hernandez found out when he tried gain entry to a ranch south of the Falfurrias checkpoint on U.S. 281.

Larraenza is director and founder of Desert Angels, a San Diego, Calif.-based volunteer search and rescue group. The volunteers operate mainly in California and Arizona, but as the death toll in Brooks County rose, Larraenza began receiving calls from distressed families in search of lost relatives there.

Consulates, migrant shelters in Mexico, law enforcement, hospitals and morgues make for a large and unwieldy network, and when families come to a dead end, Larraenza is called to the scene.

He keeps a list of people who've disappeared, based on information Desert Angels gathered over three trips to Texas in the past year. Scores of immigrants still are missing, and he believes many died somewhere in Brooks County.

“I can tell you that in January and February (2012), we recorded 176 people lost and likely dead,” Larraenza said. “We've been looking for them since last summer. Where are they?”

Alejandro agreed to pay a smuggler $1,800 for Aldo, 22, to join his family in Houston. In late May, Aldo left behind his childhood home in Pachuca, about 60 miles south of Mexico City, for the first time in his life.

He crossed the border from Reynosa to McAllen and was kept for days in a cramped, poorly ventilated house, with scant food and water.

When it came time for his group to leave, he already was in a weakened condition. A few hours into his trek, Alejandro received a call from the smuggler. Aldo had collapsed not far from the Falfurrias checkpoint. Alejandro, who eagerly awaited his arrival, urged him by phone to carry on.

“I told him to push himself,” he said, “'We're here waiting for you.'”

Not long after, the phone was disconnected.

Alejandro contacted the Sheriff's Office and gave rough coordinates to where officials might find his brother. To his surprise, a body was found, but the estimated time of death didn't jibe with the dates his brother was supposed to have been in the area.

A DNA test would put to rest any lingering doubts that his brother is among the dozens of unidentified, but Alejandro ruled out the possibility as being too costly.